Fear and Loathing in Open Source Marketing

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienatingthe community that so far has driven their success.

Despite being the owner of the Drupal brand and employing the project lead Dries Buytaert, Acquia has to figure out how to balance their commercial concerns as well as the care and feeding of the vibrant Drupal community. Luckily on the announcement of their funding Dries is saying all the right things:

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment,because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we’re going to do our part. We’ll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc.

Growth of the Drupal community, who until Joomla’s explosion came on the open source CMS scene was probably the biggest by community size. Ironically Joomla! started by forking from a commercially supported open source project. y that Drupal has and have an opposite legacy (commercial sponsorship to purely free and open source).

Competing with the group of vendors already active in the Drupal marketplace. Many of whom have already been supporting the Drupal project while making a living as consultants.

With that being said there’s a critical balance to strike between the traditional product marketing and the evangelistic word-of-mouth marketing that has grown the Drupal brand. I hope in their ambition to become commercial they don’t become the soulless snake oil salesman that defined tech marketing in the past.

Shoving Your way into a Crowded Market

I can’t imagine walking into a venture capitalist and saying, I want to enter a market that already has hundreds of competitive vendors without getting laughed out the door. That’s unless you have hundreds of thousands of community members and users. Acquia is in that enviable position. They have a huge active community. They have thousands of users of their software including many reputable and high profile companies. The things that so many traditional companies are craving these days. Their next critical step is to continue to move forward in parallel with their community.

So far Drupal has benefited from the most powerful software development, distribution, and marketing mechanisms today. That looks something like this:

Develop a good free product

Grow a community around that product

Achieve wide spread adoption and brand recognition

Find complimentary, not antagonistic, ways to monetize this success which is their next step

This formula is what has worked for Red Hat, MySQL, and all indications show that it’s working for companies like SugarCRM and Alfresco.

Since I opened with words of wisdom of Hunter S. Thomspon maybe I should paraphrase one of his more famous sayings, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.

In the technology start-up world the realityoften goes:

There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a bunch of software developers in the wake of their funding.

I sincerely hope that Acquia will flourish (along with Drupal) and I wish them the best of luck just remember where you came from.

3 Comments

Find complimentary, not antagonistic, ways to monetize this success which is their next step

Very good point. I think the challenge will be to create a company that is embraced by the community and doesn’t alienate it. Time will tell but I feel confident the team behind Acquia understands the challenges and diplomacy required to build a successful company that makes the Drupal product and brand stronger.

You know I love Drupal. Just when I fell in love with Drupal I noticied three disturbing things happen. Buytaert trademarked Drupal, then Acquia was formed and then they got funding. I also think VC’s can ruin a company really fast. I have kept a close eye on them and I think you are right it is a tricky business. I recently wrote an article about them Go Big or Go Home – http://www.johnmwillis.com/enterprise-search/go-big-or-go-home/

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This is the personal opinion blog of Mark R. Hinkle and does not reflect the opinion of my employer Citrix Systems Inc.. I am also an avid investor and have holdings in numerous industries, both public and private companies. Investments are often made for me by a third party and best efforts will be made to disclose any investments that may be germane at the time of the posts made herein.

Opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.